Monster
by Lady Shockbox
Summary: In the nightmarish chaos of the USG Ishimura's death throes, you were a victim. Ultimately, you also became a monster. Oneshot. Hunter centric.


Dead Space has become my all time favorite video game _ever_ since it came out. I really wanted to write something for it for awhile now, but the inspiration to come up with a half plausible and decent plot did not strike me until just recently. As of late, I started getting into second person POV writing and I was thinking about writing something that no one would think of… and then it hit me to do something about the Hunter. He scares the _hell_ out of me, just for the record. The first time I ever faced off against him, I was killed right off the bat because I had panicked so badly when I saw I could not kill him. The fact that he even seemed to show _sentience_, like calculatingly glaring at Isaac and rubbing his claws threateningly at him, scared me even more. _Then_ there was the added bit where he actually stalked Isaac for the rest of the game that followed chapter five through ten. You can hear him making grunting noises during chapter eight when you first get ready to walk to the bridge… I even caught a glimpse of him once during chapter seven. Regardless, I never viewed the monsters from Dead Space as necessarily being evil. As mentioned in Extraction, they are simply animals following the instinct to hunt. With that said, allow me to present to you my own personal perspective of the Hunter. Dead Space is not mine. This is also my first shot at this fandom, which I hope to be revisiting regularly. Concrit would be loved if received.

* * *

**I hate what I've become, the nightmare's just begun**

**I must confess that I feel like a monster**

_Monster_ - Skillet

**i**

You _hate_ what you have become.

It was never always like that you know, but it's not like it could ever be helped again either. That's the biggest reason for why you hate yourself so much now. You used to be "normal" like everyone else before the unrelenting hell broke loose on the USG _Ishimura, _named after Hideki Ishimura, the inventor of the shockpoint drive. Before that, you used to be an engineer, no one significantly special. Simply put, you were nothing more than a simple cog in the great machine of the CEC's largest and oldest serving planet cracker starship. You had a family on Earth - an adoring wife and lovely little girl - who had been counting on you for your workings at the Concordance Extraction Company to ensure a sustainable living for the three of you. Your family was never poor per say, but your daughter's chemotherapy treatments had sucked you and your wife's account for her college education dry. They were both depending on you to make money, but now there won't be any hope of that for your daughter now. Not for college and not even to save her _life_. Marissa won't even ever get to see you, her own father, ever again.

Your life is destroyed. Destroyed all because of that damn Marker, those goddamn zealous Unitologists, and the entire fucking Aegis VII mission.

You were just a standard engineer. You were not _meant_ to serve on janitorial duty that one day in the medical wing of the ship. Ever since Captain Matthius died, that prissy second engineer and damn son of a bitch Jacob Temple had you reassigned to help with managing the bodies of the rapidly piling dead - some who had committed suicide, others who were found murdered - while he went off to deal with the rest of the ship's failing systems. "You'll be more useful here than there," the everlastingly preeminent man told you, but you knew better. He just wanted you out of the way. You were not as great of a mechanic as he was and you know that _damn_ well. He did not want you to get in the way, so he got rid of you. Mother fucker.

Everything had gone to _hell_. Ever since the day that they found the Marker on the planet surface not far from the main colony, it did not take long for the shit to hit the fan. You never believed in the overall basis of the Unitology religion to begin with - you thought they were all a bit insane, as you were atheist in that lifetime - but you could not help but feel unnerved when everyone started going ballistic on the colony consequent of the Marker's removal. What perhaps bothered you the most was when those Unitologists all committed mass suicide that one day. The captain and the higher-ups tried to keep everything hushed with comfortingly deceiving words and brilliant calligraphy, but the rumors still rode wild around every corner of the ship. Everyone was on edge, untrusting, nervous, _terrified_. You and the others were not sure _why_ necessarily, but the feeling was at its worst on the day they were preparing to pop the cork on the planet.

It was when they popped the cork that your life - and the life of the family that you left behind - was doomed to ruin.

All communication was instantaneously lost with the colony, and the blackout showed no signs of lifting whatsoever. The higher-ups also abruptly deemed the planet side settlement to be under quarantine for reasons you could not immediately fathom. The lockdown, however, did not stop one particular ship from passing through. Over the next few hours that followed its apparent crash landing in one of the ship's main hangar bays, you and the other engineers noticed strange organic growths on the walls of the ship. That was when Captain Benjamin Matthius ordered the crew working with the ADS to open fire on any other ships that tried to make it to the _Ishimura_. In following was when things began to more rapidly descend into the pandemonium of pandemic proportions.

From what you recall, the energy signatures of crewmember RIGs from all around the ship had began to flat line. People were suddenly _dying_. Benjamin Matthius was killed, apparently murdered, by Dr. Terrence Kayne shortly following the main colony blackout. Then communications around the ship abruptly ceased from jamming and malfunctions while the remainder of transceivers still working only received jumbled, incoherent broadcasts. Several of those many incoherent transmissions, from what you heard, mentioned something along the lines of a "Leviathan" in food storage and an "Urchin" below the ship levels in water processing. You heard of a massacre in the mess hall. You overheard Jacob talking to someone over the radio about all but one escape pod being launched away from the ship - all of them _empty_ - and then there came news of the monsters: People reporting seeing their friends dragged away into the walls by huge tentacles and claiming to witness _firsthand_ the fantastically grotesque creatures that stalked their victims before swiftly killing them with predatory keenness.

It was only when the ship's engines stopped that Jacob ordered you to the medical deck so he could do something about the problem. Undoubtedly, the young man was having delusions of being a hero in the spiraling madness.

You, ultimately, were a victim.

The senior medical officer - Nicole Brennan was her name, though only if you remember correctly - had ordered you to Dr. Challus Mercer's office to drop off paperwork regarding several terminal patients who had been fatally wounded by "monsters" around the ship. You obediently obliged. On your way there however, you noticed something oddly conspicuous: None of the other doctors were present in the halls. You could have _sworn_ you saw them earlier. Why, when you first got off the tram onto the medical deck, the entire facility was practically _swarming_ with them. In fact, you never ran into a single soul on your way down. It was a greatly unnerving spectacle made more unnerving when Mercer did not answer your persistent knocks at his office door. You found yourself terrified of being out in the open, and the fact you thought you heard _something_ scuttle behind you and out of sight sealed the deal: You hacked your way into the doctor's office. You had done it plenty of times before anyways, and you figured it would just be routine. It was not as if you were breaking in to steal from the doctor. You were just going to drop off the paperwork and leave as soon as you possibly, humanly could.

The first beginnings of your nightmare met you as soon as you opened the door.

The walls and ceilings were _covered_ in the strange alien writing that some of the patients in the ward had persisted on scribbling when they managed to get their hands on writing utensils, except the writing on Mercer's office walls was not _all_ written in pen. Some was paint, some chalk, some… you did not know _what_ some of the things were - and you honestly found that you did not want to know - but there was no denying that some of the writing was scrawled in dark red, congealed _blood_. Some of the bloodied scribbling, frighteningly enough, was also fresh and bright red like the tattered Unitologist flags suspended from the ceiling. If that did not scar you for what little of your immortal life remained, the severed heads contained in glass jars and on shelves _did._ You reeled back in absolute horror and uttered a small shriek of utter terror, but then strong hands grabbed you from behind and shoved something over your mouth and nose. Chloroform. You could not fight him. You were unconscious in seconds.

When you came to, you found yourself strapped to a gurney in a laboratory with its floors scattered with paperwork and blood. Your weariness kept you from initially recognizing where you were. It was only after a few minutes of frantically shaking your cloudy head to clear your thoughts that you distinctly recalled your surroundings. You were in the chemical lab just outside the cryogenics room. A light was shining down in your face with enough luminosity to bind you and keep you from positively identifying the figure looming above. His silhouette and low murmuring betrays his speaking into the audio long on the bedside table just to your left. You were terrified. You asked him to let you go, beseeched him, _begged_, but he merely kept recording his audio log while fiddling with some device in his hands. You could not really hear what he was saying or what device he was working, but then you registered _exactly_ what he said when he lifted the device up to be shadowed against the light glaring in your eyes. The drill did not inspire any sort of confidence in you at all. That was when you truly began to fear for your life.

"The forehead has been swabbed clean and marked…" You finally recognized his voice as belonging to Dr. Challus Mercer. The low electronic whirring of the drill starts to life.

Your voice was a panicked squeak. "What are you… what are you doing with that?"

He did not answer you. The drill descends downward. The last thing you ever heard was "I am now attempting to create a passage to insert the sample tissue into…" You could not understand anything else he said because of your own horrified screams that quickly turned into shrieks of agony. Moisture quickly swelled in your eyes and between your legs.

Then nothing. You _died_. Unfortunately, you did not stay dead.

You first became aware of your surroundings again when you realized you were in a stasis tank, overlooking the same medical laboratory that you were murdered in during your human life. The madman who took you hostage and tormented you came upon your tube, cooing over you as though you were some kind of child. _His_ child. More or less, the comparison is accurate enough. Everything about you felt _wrong_. Even though you were submerged in the liquid that should have surely drowned you, you did not feel the need to breathe. In fact, _trying_ to breathe ended in failure. The gel merely entered through your mouth and seemingly filled you up without the ill affects one would have otherwise suffered from the distinct lack of oxygen. That was not the only thing. Your sense of touch was gone, replaced by a numb tingling in all your appendages. Your sight was different as well. You felt cold. You had no heartbeat. _Everything_ was different. Even your appearance.

Looking down at yourself for the first time, you were sure you would have broken out in a mad fit of hysteria seeing what happened to you. You were - _are_ - a _freak_. You were overwhelmed by a fiery rage about what you were turned into by Dr. Challus Mercer, but then your comprehension cleared further and you realized something else of an even more horrifying magnitude: You have immense difficulty remembering who once were. In fact, you remember very little of your human existence. All you can clearly recall is your time on the _Ishimura_ and your family, but nothing of anything prior. You cannot remember what university you attended, what your first car was, or where you first met your once wife and where your once daughter was born.

Everything floated by in a dreamy sequence. One minute, you were asleep and the next thing you know is waking up and seeing that man, the insane doctor… was it _really_ Dr. Mercer, or was you just hallucinating his avatar because he was the one you were going to see before you were kidnapped and murdered? You do not know. You cannot focus. You would go to sleep again. Sometimes you would wake up in pain when he electrocuted the gelatinous liquid of the chamber you were trapped within. Maybe it was for an experiment. You thought so. Either way, it hurt and all you could do was restlessly squirm and scream your displeasure. You would grunt for hours on end when the torture was over, restless and desperate to escape, although you could not because you were _trapped_. Imprisoned. A _prisoner. _

In all honesty however, part of you did_ not_ want to escape. Because who in their right mind would have wanted to be exposed to what you had become? You are a freak. A hideous, mutated, monstrous _freak. _You could see enough of your reflection in your cylinder glass prison to know that. You eyes were not a sea blue anymore. They are a puss yellow. Your face is not that light cocoa tan that your wife once adored so. It is ravaged and dark with necrotic flesh. You are unrecognizable. You are inhuman.

Maybe it was hours. Perhaps days. For all you know, it was a millennia since you were turned. You never saw the doctor leave the lab for all the times you blearily surfaced to the land of the conscious but, curiously enough, you suddenly found at one particular instant that the doctor was nowhere to be seen. He did not return. In the meantime, you also noticed that the ether that he was using on you to keep you contained and calm was rapidly wearing off. You could sense the feeling in your numb limbs just barely returning, although you still found great difficulty in lifting your head.

The door at the right hand side of the laboratory hissed open, although it was not the doctor who cautiously entered.

The man who walked into the laboratory crowned a level three engineering suit. You remember the model because _you_ once wore that same brand of uniform back when you were an engineer yourself. It wasn't as if that shred of memory mattered anymore, though. All that mattered to you was that you suddenly felt a fire burning inside your chest and it was making you unbelievably angry. How was it, you wonder, that that man wasn't captured and imprisoned in the manner that you were? How _is it_, you continue to question, that _you_ had to suffer?

Fate was a sick and twisted thing of endless torments. It infuriated you.

The engineer spared a quick look at you, took a quick dodging step back, and hung back suspended in the doorway before completely entering with cautious steps. He turned sideways. There was probably another cylinder beside you with a failed experiment. You know because the doctor always fussed over you and not the tank beside yours. The engineer raised his weapon - you recognized it was a 211-V plasma cutter, although slightly upgraded with half a dozen or so power nodes glowing within its intricate workings - and approached the tank. He momentarily left your line of sight, but then he reappeared in front of _your_ stasis tube. It appeared as though he could not tell that you were awake and watching. Despite the three neon green bands of light that concealed his expression from the rest of the outside world, you knew deep down in the pit of your being that he was awing at your almost unreal appearance in horror.

He suddenly moved away, not daring to look back at you. He glanced around, activated the blue objective line in the palm of his suit's hand, and you could see that the line led to the console that the doctor would rigorously work at. The engineer approached it, meddled momentarily with the controls, and the machinery whirred lightly until a capsule appeared emerging from the console. It was only when the man took it, however, that the holographic pads on the doors turned from neon blue to beaming crimson. Someone locked the doors from the outside.

The shades on the window to the engineer's left shutter up and open. Dr. Mercer - you're _positive_ that's who he is now that you're not drugged and can clearly recognize his ravingly calm tone - stood opposite of the bullet proof glass separating him and the man in the chemical lab with you. He asked almost politely what the engineer was doing. The engineer snapped to attention and turned to look in the doctor's direction in startled surprise, lifting his gun to the level of Mercer's shoulder, almost as though he was planning to dismember the other man's arm instead of going for a headshot. You found the engineer's aim odd, although it was obvious that he was purposely leveling his plasma cutter's crosshairs that way. You could only fathom why at first, but then your curiosity left you and drifted back toward what Mercer is saying. The engineer remained silent, either incapable of speech or not daring it, while Mercer ranted on quietly about mankind's extinction and the birth of the children to replace them.

With a start, you realized that _you_ were one of those supposed children. The memory of what happened to you returned so violently that your hatred for the engineer returned in a violent blast of heat and coldness. Strength was still only _just_ slowly returning to you, but you still strained to move regardless. You managed a slight twitch of your left arm. You continued to valiantly will yourself to break free from your encased glass prison. You wanted _out_.

Mercer's last words before he walked out of sight from behind the glass pierce your hearing. Despite its muffled sound through the glass and gelatinous liquid surrounding you, it slammed your sense of comprehension like the spinning, tearing drill that killed you when it descended down against your forehead and into your brain. Like the electric shocks the doctor sent through your body. Like the terrible knowledge that you would never get to see your wife or terminally ill daughter ever again.

"I leave you with my greatest creation."

So that's what you were? An _experiment?_ A _thing_ that could have been easily thrown away, all at the cost of an insignificant and lost _life_ gone in vain? Your anger was prominent alongside with your flaming fury before, but now it was peaking like a volcano on the brink of a devastating eruption. You wanted something to suffer. You wanted to be the cause of that unfortunate thing's suffering. You wanted _revenge_.

Full feeling returned to your limbs abruptly and you madly thrashed about like a starving wild animal that had just been awoken from its slumber. Out of the corner of your peripheral vision, you could see the engineer whip about in place to stare at you in muted disbelief. You lashed out with your claws and broke free from the tube, sending glass fragments and the emerald gel liquid spewing airborne and everywhere.

The nightmare had just begun.

The engineer saw you and, instantly, he opened fire with his tool as though it were a weapon. Although it wasn't built with the purpose or thought of ripping through flesh in mind, its effect was immediate and its intended terms of use proved rather effective. You lost your footing beneath you when your legs were severed from your body. Your arms quickly followed. With a low grinding hiss, you squirmed in place while the man continued to shoot you out of instinct in a vain attempt to shatter your head. His aim was slightly off with you squirming. He stopped only to reload, and that was when you realized that your limbs were growing back from the stumps they were severed from.

With a minor start of horror, you realized _you cannot die_. The horror was replaced by sheer, undying vehemence, and you directed that at the engineer.

As soon as you stood again, he shot you with a blast of stasis. You were too close and he missed. With a mighty swing, you slashed out with one of your huge claws and you struck him with a swiping blow directly across his chest plating. He cried out in pain and staggered back. The armor on his chest held strong, although he was severely hurt beneath. The fully light green tube of the RIG on his back depleted to half, turning its once vibrant glow to a sickly yellow hue. With a wheeze - a sound that you heartily quaff with your ears - he staggered backward further and shot again. The blast of plasma caught your leg and you fell, but it didn't stop you from dragging yourself forward for the kill. He strafed on the double to avoid you swing and he shot again, hitting and severing your claw. Everything started to promptly regenerate upon prompt.

You _could not_ die, or at least not in the conventional. There would be no promise of relief for you. There would _never_ be relief for you. You would have to live as a freak for the rest of your existence as a damned immortal demon.

The engineer's radio sounded off and a woman's voice radiated through. For a moment, you thought your wife. It was then that, with a start of agony, you realized you could only remember her face and not her name. Was she an Emily? Was she a Casandra? Was she a Marissa? No, that was your daughter. It pained you like someone had punched a hole through your chest. You hoped with a shred of desperateness that your nameless wife won't ever see you the way you are now. Then there was your daughter. Would she have sounded like the woman on the radio if she got the chance to live without cancer? Maybe. Without money coming in to treat her illness however, she'll die. Her eventual death will be at your hands. The loneliness of you wife without a daughter and husband will also be at your hands. Your own damnation is at your hands, and all you wanted to do was release your anger and kill the stupid engineer who got off scotch free.

You wanted him dead. You wanted to _kill._

The woman screaming through the engineer's radio told him to get out and run, that the beast - _you_ - will just keep regenerating. She referred to the engineer being named Isaac. That name burns a brand on your mind. _Isaac_. You want _Isaac_ to suffer. You want _Isaac_ to feel your pain. You want _Isaac_ dead.

Your urge to kill the man is monstrous.

By the time you managed to stagger to your feet on your newly reformed limbs, Isaac had already managed to get out of the room and throw himself to the wall opposite of the laboratory. He leaned heavily against the wall, plasma cutter aimed high and in your direction, and he watched you intently. You stared back. He wanted to play _that_ game, did he? Fine. You decided to willingly and readily play along. If he was to be the Hunted, you were to undoubtedly be the_ Hunter_.

You rubbed your massive spiked claws together menacingly, glaring at Isaac with your peering yellow eyes before turning and going to the vent. You slashed it open and jumped inside before leaping up into the ventilation system. The stigma of what you became weighed your heart down like the force of the drill entering your skull, but the virulent bitterness that overcame you kept you from dwelling on the reality of what you ultimately transformed into. Your new niche in your strange new world and second life is all that mattered to you now as you began your great hunt. It was not a pleasant existence - you quickly realized that it was also very, _very_ lonely, as the other "creatures" you meet in the vents are all too stupid to notice you otherwise - although you at least still had your sentience. The other monsters seemed robotic, _insentient_. Almost like ants in a colony. They were programmed to attack prey on sight alone but you, however, could hunt. It wasn't much, but it was the only shred of partial humanity that you had left to desperately cling and claw to.

Although, ultimately, you have to confess to yourself that you _still_ feel like a monster.

**Fin**


End file.
